What You Can't Say (2004)
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
His problem in 2004 (the year the United States launched an attack on a foreign country): people disagree with him and that makes him uncomfortable.
The idea that all humans don't self-censor by default in front of all sorts of people is pretty myopic.
In my understanding, he's worrying that it's everywhere, all the time, in the self-censor sense.
I don't think he's worried about self-censorship in itself. If he's worried about anything in this essay, I would say it's the possibility of losing the option he describes here:
"The trouble with keeping your thoughts secret, though, is that you lose the advantages of discussion. Talking about an idea leads to more ideas. So the optimal plan, if you can manage it, is to have a few trusted friends you can speak openly to. This is not just a way to develop ideas; it's also a good rule of thumb for choosing friends. The people you can say heretical things to without getting jumped on are also the most interesting to know."
MY big opinion that I'm violating right now: Never Post. Especially about "cancel culture".
Cheers
I doubt humans can even socially function (let alone progress) if we let the countless injustices happening every second occupy the entirety of our minds at all times—and it is the seemingly abstract works in philosophy, science that lay the necessary foundation for concrete progress that hopefully contributes to resolving those injustices.
That said, is this just an elaborate justification for my own inaction? Should it be the next obvious thing that used to be unthinkable to talk about (like racial equality in the early times of chattel slavery) that a conscious person ought to withhold meaningful but not-directly-helping contributions to humanity until—I don’t know the exact measure here—say, the world is free of suffering and violence?
I almost wrote "I wish people would read moral philosophers on moral philosophy, not tech founders."
He does give some examples, and they seem to fit in two categories: things done by tyrants, and other people thinking you should expand one's moral categories.
I think it's clear that the ones that bother him, in his actual life, are the latter.
There's authority based censorship, like the banned books list. People legitimately believed that Catcher in the Rye caused serial killers at one point and definitely cast judgement on those willing to admit they'd read it. At the time, reading the book could cost you in social capital which I think is what PG is alluding to. From what I read, PG just wishes we didn't exercise moral judgement - which I get. I came from a religious background that weaponized their morals for ostracization or for hate, meanwhile, nobody within the system recognized they were doing that because they were blinded by the righteousness of their morals. In that way, morals are sticky webs.
My curiosity drifts in a different way - assuming you can't rid the world of moral addiction - why were the people who believe such foolish morals (like banning books) not punished post facto? Folks with a laundry list of morals will often use the word "consequences", but where are their consequences when this moral falls out of style and has senselessly ruined lives?
Conservatives are banning books and outlawing kinds of self-expression, kinds of self-identity, in many countries, RIGHT NOW.
What opinions, in 2004, or 2022, does Paul Graham not think one can express safely? I'm skeptical it's the list of opinions that the state is actually being used to suppress, just opinions that many people find morally objectionable.
I agree, conservatives and liberals using morality as an excuse to cause harm are problematic.
> What opinions, in 2004, or 2022, does Paul Graham not think one can express safely
If I had to guess he's probably thinking on the war and what he's allowed to and what he's not allowed to say. The USG certainly wasn't telling him no; it was individuals and their morals who created an environment of fear and walking on eggshells. I'm not sure how that differs from what we experience today. That said, I think what PG is talking about is the long-term frailty of morals. They change constantly, because they're largely based on hegemonic personal perceptions. To me, the overarching argument is to let morality take a backseat and let people question the world for themselves.
If he can't take a public stand on an issue of the day, because some people will disagree with him—why should we listen to him on any issue? What's he self-censoring? Something important? Millions protested the invasion of Iraq; why didn't they self-censor? And if he were standing with me in 2004, talking about WMDs and how right Bush and company were to have plotted this—he would face my moral disagreement.
Morals are not "long-term frail". Just the morals of rich men like Paul Graham. Right and wrong exist. There's a battle in the public space right now because some of the things happened are wrong.
You either get good and evil, or you don't.
But honestly, I stated my "priors" unequivocally, with specific examples of current legislation that's coming from only one side, and you went "both sides", didn't answer a specific thing, and left in a huff?
What conclusion do you actually think I'm drawing about this interaction. You posted on my comment.
> you went "both sides"
I don't know why people like you act like this is a bad thing. The left isn't good, or really great. In fact, it kind of sucks, just a little less than the right. White-bashing has become common place and acceptable in left-leaning circles, misandry has taken off like never before, when I was living in San Diego I watched self-proclaimed leftists in Ocean Beach dressed in all black, helmets, and baseball gear beat the shit out of people with bikes, knives, and CS gas. A prominent antisemite has been allowed to not only stay in office but also continue in committees and receives praise to this day.
On the other hand, you're right that the right has allowed bad behavior to make it into the actual representational ranks with those like MTG (there are more, just an example). From my perspective, that doesn't make the left any much better than the right, other than that they have some material functions within the DNC that allow them to keep those kinds of people (who are still constituents) away. I do think the RNC needs to implement these functions, and I understand why they didn't, but the US never would've gotten a world with Donald Trump had the right implemented super delegates the way the left does.
Maybe instead of acting like the left is a rosy and immaculate institution you should examine the fractures in the facade that people try to cover up with warm rhetoric.
https://freedomforallamericans.org/legislative-tracker/schoo...
https://freedomforallamericans.org/legislative-tracker/anti-...
FindLaw is a pretty ideologically neutral resource:
https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/law-and-life/book-banning...
https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/law-and-life/understandin...
https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/law-and-life/can-academic...
I could go on and on but you'll see it or you'll find reasons not to.
This comes from one political quadrant.
There is no other side to this issue, which is the issue I've been discussing.
I don't know what to tell you to get you to see that substituting some rioting anarchist self-proclaimed leftists who have no representation in our politics for the liberals I referred to is insulting to my intelligence.
> I don't know what to tell you to get you to see that substituting some rioting anarchist self-proclaimed leftists who have no representation in our politics for the liberals I referred to is insulting to my intelligence.
I guess one primary differentiator in our views is that you view the actions of representatives as more important than the actions and hegemony of constituents. I do not.
One side is making laws banning speech and criminalizing identity, yet every single article about this talks first and foremost about some nebulous threat to free speech, and when questioned for real examples, real measure of the phenomenon, are only met with dissembling.
I absolutely do question liberal politicians; their failures are extremely frustrating. Far left antics don't touch them at all; as for The Squad, they're some of the most responsible politicians in this country. Those are my judgments. What I don't countenance is that anything like the problems with liberal and left-wing politics measures up against the systemic assault on human freedom being waged around the world by right wing political parties, making actual policy.
If you had an example of a liberal or even left-wing law that suppresses speech I feel like you would have supplied it. Some things are not balanced. Some things are not true. Some things are not right.
I don't even know what black bloc is. These are the folks: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/public-safety/stor...
That area is near where I lived and where I'd visit often. I guess to you it's not a problem, but to me it was very visible. Also entirely anti-liberal and they faced very little if any formal condemnation.
> Far left antics don't touch them at all; as for The Squad, they're some of the most responsible politicians in this country.
Ilhan Omar is the antisemite I was talking about, and it wasn't some one-time occurrence either [1]. AOC, to me, is an agitator similar to Matt Gates or Ted Cruz. As for the rest of the "the squad" I have no idea what they do.
Liberals suppressing free speech is almost entirely grass roots, it's a certain type of liberal constituent that's grown over time. As I said earlier, the DNC generally has a mechanism for keeping them out of office, but there are notable exceptions. I don't think constituency is something to ignore though.
A notable example of how these constituents do things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE... While I don't agree with Brendan on a lot (if you search through my account I've argued with him on here before), using extra-legal measures to force someone out of a position especially after they've tried to make amends was fairly sickening. The cherry on top was that it was over two past political donations during a time when those views were certainly mainstream. Examples like this aren't really hard to find and, no, I'm not going to sit here and enumerate them for you. Especially as you've been bragging about how intellectually superior you are.
1: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/6/18251639/il...
8 arrests. Wow. Looks like they burned your whole town down. Except that didn't happen, and the police won. The Democrats did this to you? No. Far left activists in masks.
Seems like Brendan Eich had a raw experience. He also seems like he's doing fine. "Extra-legal"? Nonsense word.
Maybe too many people are losing their jobs due to accidentally saying mean things about gay people; maybe this is politically lopsided; if so, quantify it.
Again, if you think it's anything like the equivalent of the laws listed in those prior links, you're simply refusing to reckon with what I'm saying.
I think I'm finished. Wish HN allowed for account deletion.
...is not the idea pg's essay is talking about. In fact he calls the advice to self-censor by default (Wooton's advice to Milton) "wise advice". He's obviously aware that people self-censor and he obviously doesn't think that's a bad thing in itself.
> people disagree with him and that makes him uncomfortable.
Where are you getting that from?
We have such labels today, of course, quite a lot of them, from the all-purpose "inappropriate" to the dreaded "divisive." In any period, it should be easy to figure out what such labels are, simply by looking at what people call ideas they disagree with besides untrue. When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that's a straightforward criticism, but when he attacks a statement as "divisive" or "racially insensitive" instead of arguing that it's false, we should start paying attention.
So another way to figure out which of our taboos future generations will laugh at is to start with the labels. Take a label — "sexist", for example — and try to think of some ideas that would be called that. Then for each ask, might this be true?
But honestly: the stuff about "racial insensitivity" and the words "divisive" and "inappropriate" DO get somewhere in the ballpark of "uncomfortable". I'm trying for a neutral word to capture it. None of this is anything like the historical examples—totalitarianism, religious persecution—that inflate his abstract case. These are still problems today on a scale that dwarfs "cancel culture" and "self-censorship".
He gives historical examples. Instead of giving contemporary examples, though, he hand-waves in a way that absolutely will make one side nod vigorously with their priors. Its BS. Tech executives keep getting treated like moral philosophers because they wink and say "why not phrenology?" in order to pose as victims. Galileo was oppressed by religious conservatives engaging in a moral panic. That's happening now, too.
Why do you think that his giving a variety of examples with different moral weights is a problem? The fact that big moral issues exist does not mean small ones don't, nor does it mean all small ones should be ignored until all of the big ones are fixed.
> Instead of giving contemporary examples, though, he hand-waves in a way that absolutely will make one side nod vigorously with their priors.
He addressed the question of contemporary examples in a follow-up here:
I'm not sure we read the same article. (For example, the things pg says people in the 1830s would be horrified to hear do not include the thing you mention--and of course there were plenty of people in the 1830s who agreed with the viewpoint you mention and said it, loudly, so it was hardly something "you can't say" in that time period.) I don't agree with your vituperative criticisms, but I doubt we'll get anywhere with further discussion.
The way I put it is a legitimate if somewhat more abstract (but historically literate) gloss on this. My point is that PG is saying is dumb and ignorant and does not support his fantasizing about being Galileo. I have no idea what point you're trying to make.
I am not saying that he is giving different "moral weights" to anything. I am saying he is invoking an extreme moral context: religious persecution, totalitarian wartime governments. Then he starts talking about how some things (he won't give any example but adverts to some social justice code words as bad) are moral threats like this, insofar as they make us hide our beliefs.
They are not. He is making a bunch of category mistakes. There are in fact numerous specific threats to free speech and human freedom in 2004 and 2022: there are people with specific beliefs, specific identities actually being targeted today. It seems to me that people who want to discuss censorship in the abstract aren't interested in the actual moral challenge this poses.
Taking it at it's word, PG's article should prompt you to explore a thought space you think should be self-censored in many environments. Can YOU give me an example that might convince me? This is a safe space ;)
There is an argument that people should not be held responsible for decades old views, as well as the argument that people should be given an opportunity to learn new social norms instead of being immediately canceled. But to say that these issues are just as arbitrary as fashion is a completely different argument --- and a specious one at that.
Some != All.
There's some truth to this that's worth pausing on.
But it's a fallacy (probably with a fancy name) to say "it made you mad therefore you worry it's true".
A statement could be false yet incite anger because it's demonstrably harmful.
This makes it a useful measure sometimes. If a thing you say causes anger, it may or may not be true—but it definitely indicates your counterpart’s sensitivity to and bias against it being true; the chance of it being false is thus elevated.
Making it more personal: Would you get angry were someone to falsely accuse you of a crime? Would it frighten you? Would those emotions come from a lack of confidence in the truth, or a lack of confidence in your support system and, ultimately, the justice system to separate fact from fiction?
Fear is natural if hate has the potential to spill into action, but anger is a signature behavior of a cornered creature—it will not lend credence to any of your counter statements and is useful in a very, very limited range of scenarios. Keep your cool.
To circle back to the topic at hand, any anger stems from fear/insecurity (which may or may not be warranted); when it happens unexpectedly when discussing a random topic, like in TFA—no one wishes death to anyone, and yet someone gets mad—then it is a useful indicator.
The thing is, if you really want to prevent antisemitic violence, censorship is not going to help. If someone claims that the Jews rule the world, you can argue, “so why did the Jews end up on the wrong side of the Shoah” and if they claim the Shoah didn’t happen, you bring out all the documentary evidence that it did happen. If censorship is on the table, the anti-Semite can—as he does in many countries already—censor all of the documentary evidence that demonstrates the barbarity of his position.
Is he trying to say that there's nothing moral under the sun? That there are no evil ideas? Do I even need to put forward examples?!
And providing no framework or tools to distinguish between the two and just telling everyone "go for it" is dangerous. I'm mad at the idea. And no. I don't think it's because it might be true.
"You should tell the truth" yes, probably you should but should you always? what if you can prevent trouble if you lie? what if you can save someone form getting hurts by lying? what if you omit something etc. etc.
"You should not take a life" except if self-defense, defense of someone else, if the person poses an imminent danger to you or someone else, the person is military personnel form a different country, the person is unborn etc. etc.
But failure to articulate universal moral rules concisely, doesn't mean there's no concensus.
Circumstances and relevant context can be very complicated and laborious to describe, but there are still many cases where overwhelming majority of people would agree on what's right and what's wrong.
It's an ideal, and as with every ideal, we're constantly striving to better meet it.
Poorly. And it was as wrong then as the opposite is today.
Let’s not really act like the secular are anywhere near the way the religious are. Most of the secular just want everyone to have secularism be an option and not have religious choices forced upon anyone.
We weren't ever "there" in the first place.
Regardless of whether you agree or not "cancelling" is more about large scale boycott of a person and the media or services associated with them. It's not "Just" about blocking someone on social media, and it often has significant impacts on the business or the individuals who are being cancelled.
> In the digital age, we are nearing the point where an idea banished by Twitter, Facebook and Google all but vanishes from public discourse entirely, and that is only going to become more true as those companies grow even further. Whatever else is true, the implications of having those companies make lists of permitted and prohibited ideas are far more significant than when ordinary private companies do the same thing. [1]
[1] hhttps://web.archive.org/web/20161012220046/https://theinterc...
Blocking people's speech on social networks is a very different thing.
If you are spouting heresies in a respectful good-faith debate, the worst that generally happens is you get yelled at/laughed at, and usually by community members and not the mods.
My takeaway isn't necessarily hypocrisy (although a few of them are certainly full of that), it's that moderation is hard because of the never-ending wave of people trying to clog up public discourse for a variety of crappy reasons.
Jeff Atwood (one of the founders of Stack Overflow, Stack Exchange, developer of Discourse) has some pretty insightful things to say about community management.
This is not about private or public companies and what they legally can or can not do. Its not that they can not write in their ToS that you aren't allowed to say X and then if you say X they ban you. That would be the expected way how thing go.
But in reality the say you aren't allowed to say "hate-speech". And then you say X and the people who didn't define hate-speech define X as hate-speech and ban you. This is a problem because it give endless opportunity to abuse
The people who make the rules also interpret the rules and enforce the rules. So anything is hate-speech if they hate it. That's not a proof that hate-speech (objectively defined) actually exists, its a proof that it subjectively enforced and that is a problem. Another example. Lets say a platform forbids the use of the n-word. People can disagree with this but still use the platform and follow that rule and they should be fine. But to actually be fine they need to know the way this rules is interpreted. for example is "n*****" against the rules because its just a substitute? And if so what about "n-word" also against the rules? What about "******" or a single "N"? what about context? can I write the full word if I quote an album/movie title? etc. etc. The problem isn't whether the rule is "good" or if someone agree or not with the rule. The problem is can people who want to follow the rules be booted of the platform anyway by simply declaring something they did as against the rules.
The answer is yes. If "hate-speech" is in the rules with no definition then p much anyone can be booted for basically anything they say. And yes the law allows this because by law they do not even need a reason, there is always something in the ToS that says that the "service" can be terminated at any time. So the argument that something is "constitutional" is pointless. There is a real problem that somehow need to be fixed. The problem doesn't go away if we just all repeat over and over that no law was broken.
That's like saying large companies avoid paying fair taxes but they do it in a legal way so its not a real problem its "constitutional" they have to do this or their shareholder could sue if they voluntarily pay more taxes. But the problem isn't that a law was broken so clamming no law was broken is a fooling argument.
Also the president was not removed from platforms due to hate-speech. Your example actually somewhat represents a case where they didn't even bother to twist or interpret their ToS/guidelines somehow to justify banning the president but instead they just did it. And again they LEGALLY can do that. By law they do not even need a reason. That doesn't mean its not a problem.
Breaking the ToS is also not the problem here the problem here is that ToS are written unspecific, specifically when they put things like "hate speech" in it because no one know what will fall under it and what not. The whole point of rules should be that people should be able to understand and comply with them easily. Instead they are used as a general propose banning reason for anything the owner may not like.
>Twitter banning someone for inciting violence is no different than a mod banning someone on a web forum for disagreeing that ATI video cards are not the best. You can't call people the n-word on facebook. If you don't believe that is real I'm not sure I have the energy to expand on it for you (perhaps someone else can).
It its not about the rules, who or why someone put them up or that they have the right to do that. Its about mutual agreement as to how the rules are interpreted else they make no sense. "Hate speech" rules make no sense because no one know how they are interpreted.
Lets say I open a forum and say in the rules "no hate speech" and then when someone says "I hate dogs" I ban them for "hate speech". Clearly I can do that since its my forum and I can do whatever I want. But that doesn't make "I hate dogs" actual "hate speech" nor does it proof that "hate speech" is a real thing. All this does it give me backdoor to remove almost anyone I want for a "pseudo reason" which I didn't need in the first place but it makes it look like I just enforce the rules and remove the bad guys.
And that is exactly what these platform do. If people would get banned for no reason given then people would question it so they put up reasons like "violated community guidelines" and similar stuff and then people assume it was the users fault. But is it the guys fault who wrote "I hate dogs"? Is that hate speech? And if so did he knowingly broke the rule? He could only know if "hate speech" is defined somehow but it isn't. Everything the platform owner hates is or can be defined as hate speech at any given time.
Hence my original post that there is no such thing as "hate speech" its a made up term to include whatever someone wants it to include.
Hate speech for sure is a real thing. Is calling someone the N-word hate speech? Not always. Context matters - there are some corner cases where it is clearly not.
But mostly, calling someone the N-word or other racial slut is a hateful act.
This word has such a long and nasty history that it is extremely clear its meaning. There are very few corner cases e.g. Hate Speech exists.
Your complaint is less that it doesn't exist, and more that mods are seemingly expanding the meaning by making judgment calls on the intent of speech.
Using another example to try and explain it, if someone said, "Why are the Inuit so lazy! They just don't want to work." (Something I cannot imagine anyone saying, btw) Well. That is a negative and purjorative generalization of a racial/social group, and whatever -ist label you want to put on it, that too is hate speech. If you walk it back a bit and get a little more wordy with the language, where it may not be as explicit making that generalization, a mod may or may not decide to ding you for it. It then depends on their reading of your intent.
Some mods get it right (I would say most), but some get it wrong, and there are a few who use TOS to enforce their own biases. That hardly negates the existence of Hate Speech.
Forum moderation is hard, as I said in a previous post. You will not always agree with the mods. And indeed the mods do not always get it right, and sometimes there are bad mods. The key is to try to first understand the TOS and second mind the social norms of that forum (just like you would at work or at church).
Above all, the same basic rule applies in online forums as it does in work or church: Just try not to be a dick.
This old Tweet [1] always comes to mind whenever someone feels they are being unjustly picked on for their views.
1: https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...
Just to head you off, I also know it is impossible to write a 5000 word sub-tweet as that is beyond the Twitter character limit.
Does anyone else think wokeism has gone too far, and we're sliding into a 1984-style era full of newspeak, wrongthink, and thoughtcrimes?
I feel a little afraid to even write that, even as a question mark, even at that level of abstraction.
That right there is probably an indication that it perhaps has gone too far.
To be clear, this is coming from a person who is hispanic, supports gay-rights, and voted for Bernie. Not that any of that should matter.
Mentioning the idea of wrongthink?
You're kind of proving my point.
Can you be specific about some of the things you believe are "wrongthink" in the eyes of "wokeism"? (Only if you feel safe doing so, of course...)
Just because I can find people expressing goofy ideas like "saying 'my concerns fell on deaf ears' is ableist language" or "deadnaming a trans person is violence" on Twitter, doesn't mean that's mainstream. Those posts get shared 100x more by people mocking them than by people agreeing with them.
Maybe you could give an example of something specific?
The Twitter mob has ruined lives and is doing everything they can to ruin the ones they target.
Do a thought experiment: Your company is a player in a certain language/framework ecosystem (python, react, whatever). As part of that, many of your employees attend and sometimes host meetups for that ecosystem. A fellow highly-involved meetup organizer from another company announces that they are transitioning gender, and that they would like to be called by a new name. Almost everyone does. A few people make mistakes, but are sincere and apologize -- they want to do better, but memory pathways are hard. But one employee at your company objects to using their new name and pronouns on moral grounds. They keep using the organizer's dead name and old pronouns, and when they are asked to use their new name, they refuse.
Do you think that is the way that a professional should act towards others in their profession?
No, that is rude. Calling it violence remains ridiculous hyperbole.
I would describe that experience for the trans person as a “vehement feeling or expression”, and inflicting a violent state on someone qualifies as “an instance of violent treatment or procedure”.
These folks argue (with scientific citations!) that words can cause physical pain and stress, and that actions that cause such things are basically tantamount to violence. What's the difference, right? If I feel bad, what does it matter whether you said mean words to me or you punched me?
The problem is, words can cause stress in all sorts of situations because social interactions can be inherently stressful. There is no non-stressful way to end a relationship or deliver a bad performance review. But sometimes it needs to be done.
Punching someone is extremely different. It's not at all something that normally has to be done, unless perhaps you were just punched first. Physical violence is fundamentally different from speech because speech has an absolutely vital dual purpose of communication, which physical violence doesn't have.
To avoid calling a huge variety of legitimate speech acts violence, we'd have to redefine violence in some tortured way, like "stuff that causes harm and stress unless it was necessary/justified".
I don't think we should redefine the most emotionally salient words in the English language just so that activists' favorite slogans can be retroactively deemed logical.
Being rude is pretty narrow in comparison.
That's beside the point, since not being rude to others for no reason is very much part of mainstream professional norms. The question you might ask yourself is rather: "is this one person acting violently towards the meetup organizer by not using their preferred pronouns and updated name". There are people who would answer this in the affirmative, but this implies a pretty loose understanding of what qualifies as "violence" in the first place, which leads to all sorts of unforeseen implications. There's a very good reason why etiquette is generally regarded as trivial when compared with more tangible ethical challenges, and "use the correct pronouns, styles and honorifics when addressing So-and-so" is the quintessential example of etiquette.
I think if I find myself in a profession that is overly concerned with things other than the work of that profession then it is time to find a new profession, or at least find new circles within the profession to associate with.
The other side of that being "gender fraud".[1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/well/mind/is-sex-by-decep...
However, pronouns are rather different, as there is an established usage of using 'he' for males and 'she' for females, i.e. in reference to the immutable quality of a person's sex. If you don't believe in the ideology of gender identity, it's more honest to keep using a person's sex-based pronouns, regardless of their preferences to the contrary.
No, but if something is bad, it doesn't follow that it is every kind and degree of bad thing. Something can be impolite without being immoral, something can be immoral without being violence, something can be violence without being murder.
Personally in this case I would say it's disrespectful, and it's against my own moral code, but I know how people like this think. For the most part they're not evil or trying to hurt. They are taking principled stands at great personal risk. They have their own moral compass and it's not the same as yours or mine.
If it were up to me, I would stop interactions between the two, then do my best to educate and persuade the offending party, and professional sanction would be a last resort.
Why are we being pushed to flatten all moral distinctions? I don't understand. Flattening all distinctions makes our thoughts crude and unwieldy. Who thinks this is a good idea and why?
Could it be that redefining our moral vocabulary dissolves the signposts of our moral world, and allows illiberal, extreme positions to masquerade as liberalism?
None of these articles mention any of the more controversial CRT viewpoints that you can find by...reading the wikipedia article. It isn't exactly a hidden secret that CRT purports that any racial disparities must be due to systemic racism, though we can use some logic to quickly falsify some its main beliefs.
I know someone who knows someone who ran an art gallery on the west coast. Most of the artists were black and the gallerist was a white man. At one point he made some offhanded remark that "don't worry, the white artists have an area over there..." Guess what happened to his career after?
These stories are everywhere, and are why people think things have gone too far.
What will you say about a trans person who is also "ace"? It is far from uncommon for people to come out as trans in their 70s, long after fetishes have lost their grip on most people.
So, if you are among that "overwhelming majority", you are just obviously wrong, on several counts.
It boggles my mind how this has become the cause célèbre amongst certain other factions of the left in recent years. Particularly given how it relies on misogynistic stereotypes and is effectively erasing homosexuality.
30 years ago people still said the same kind of uninformed stuff around gay people. Do you feel similarly about gay people?
From this, I can only conclude that transwomen, being of the male sex, are not actually women, but are simply men who want to be women, to the extent that they attempt to masquerade as such in everyday life.
Most of them will wear attire more typical of women, and many seem to be driven by a deep-seated sexual desire of themselves as a woman. So while it was put rather crassly, I don't see how what this commenter said was particularly inaccurate.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/27/18113344/twitter-trans-u...
You say that you are a little afraid to speak up but realistically you are being deliberately dramatic. Shall we start a campaign to get you booted from your job tomorrow because you are being dramatic? It's not a crime nor a reason for outrage. You face at worst a down vote
The vanguard of decency and tolerance had begun advancing in the 60s and was well under way in the 70s. Forty years later they had failed to apprehend the indefensible nature of their position which for most of the roadkill on the road to reason had been underway for their entire lives.
> The only way to not worry is to never have a high profile, or be extremely careful what you say in writing.
One could also try not being 40 years behind moving social mores in a way that currently makes your children embarrassed to be seen with you and will in 10 years be seen as indefensibly bigoted or hateful because if its going to get you fired in 10 years its probably already pretty bad you just didn't notice.
> For example, it’s only recently that he noticed the term “woke” being used beyond black Americans in just the way that “politically correct” was used before it was a pejorative. And already, he observed, it is beginning to take on the same baggage as PC once did.
from https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/06/the-futili...
But beyond that... people have been getting blackballed forever in this country.
So it's very important in this discussion to make it clear if you're complaining about just:
a) people facing repercussions for saying 'conservative' things
or
b) people facing repercussions for other things as well
or even just something like
c) the outsize influence of random anonymous people and mobs on Twitter
Ding ding ding! This is the fundamental problem. We collectively seem to care entirely too much about the fringe people who bother to vent their minds on Twitter.
Power without responsibility is a wild combination, very unstable.
That doesn't necessarily address the suicide part, except to observe coldly that the person directly responsible for the suicide is the only one who can stop it, unfortunately. So they have to figure out how to stop the assault from reaching them.
I don't have any particularly good answers, this is a fairly hard problem to solve. Probably some combination of things, up to and including involving law enforcement and giving them the tools to identify people and hold them accountable (as much as we'd like the Internet to be an anonymous place, that may be a pipe dream). Of course, what constitutes breaking the law? If someone on the playground taunts you, they're not breaking the law, and the risk to you is pretty low. But if a million people on the Internet taunt you, this is a different thing.
If he had been winning football games, he’d still be playing football. Witness the legions of other non-cancelled football players who’ve done way worse (but still win).
We also, if we want to say it's just about results, can look at Dave Chappelle, who falls on the opposite side of the "woke or not-woke" line but remains famously un-canceled despite that. So I could see someone reaching the conclusion of "the lines of 'what you can't say' aren't as strong as they're made out to be on either side, if you can bring in the money" OR the conclusion that it's not a one-sided "wokeism" thing... but "this is purely a woke thing and it's a huge problem" seems unsupportable.
The Iraq War minted hundreds of them, mostly in Dick Cheney's camp. We will be living with that legacy for generations.
Yes, because it is locked in a feedback loop with the folks who have recently decided to start saying the quiet part out loud. If people could just all around stop acting like jerks, everything would be much quieter. But nobody thinks they are the jerk.
Wokeness (as portrayed in popular culture) hit its peak during the George Floyd protests and subsequent publishing of the Harpers letter. Since then, an entire ecosystem has risen in opposition to ideas of wokeness.
Alas, the reaction to this opposition has not been to find a new consensus. Rather, communities have sharded and further polarized. Now, fervent ingroup loyalty is mandatory while the difference between each ingroup keeps expanding.
This is especially noticeable in the most radical communities on the left and the right. From draconian Trans-bans to radical no-questions asked trans-acceptance, these communities have started dealing in absolutes. The more nuanced anti-woke have coalesced around Substack and honestly make good money. But, they rely on word of mouth to reach their readers. The other side of the anti-woke use viral video and aggressive youtube algorithms to reach their viewer base. However, the nature of these algorithms means that strong emotion is promoted over nuance and reason. Finally, there are celebrity faces like Rowling, Chapelle and Rogan, who can't really be deplatformed and serve as lightning rods for criticism, while smaller voices get the necessary protection to build out their platform.
The sad part of this, is that you can't be apolitical anymore. There are only 3 acceptable positions. 1. Strong support and be embraced, 2. strong opposition and lose your friends but gain new anti-woke friends and lastly 3.stay silent while nodding to those in strong support.
Now, if your profession is one is wholly in-group for the woke, then you will be in a difficult situation. Academia, print journalism and legacy media practically force you to be #1 or #3. If you are in a more technical field like tech, it doesn't really affect your life. But, if you choose to interface with social-sciencey aspects of big-tech such as ResponsibleAI, DEI or hiring, then you will also be forced into #1 or #3.
I believe that Trumpesque utterances were driving certain demography crazy and it overcompensated by going all in into wokeness and doubling down. And while Trump was president, there wasn't a chance to escape his daily, uh, serving of wisdom, which served as an irritant that had to be scratched, scratched, scratched, scratched.
Nowadays Trump is much less prominent in the media and some people started rethinking their previous fervor.
Instead what I see is misrepresentation of what "wokeness" is; I often hear conservatives say they're "not allowed" to discuss race/sexuality/etc., when in actuality what has happened is most of American has just moved on from finding homophobia and racism entertaining.
Human beings are very sensitive because we all live on top of a foundation of delusions which protects us from the life-invalidating truth.
I've come to believe that every single person is insane. When you look into minds and see a humanity dripping with delusions spun up by life seeking a way to avoid confronting its futility...you can't help but feel this way.
I was only able to see it after I had a near death experience. Those who have never gone beyond the threshold won't ever get it until the very end.
Strictly speaking, you're correct. If a mad man talks to coconuts on an island, and no one is around to observe him, is he really mad?
However, we are a part of nature and social contexts will be with us as long as we survive. I think the separation between us and the universe is artificial. We are the universe. What else would we be?
But what I think I'm trying to get at is that utterances such as "I'm a free person...I'm a good person...What I'm doing is important...etc." can be truth statements within the context of their respective systems. 'I am free, a good person, important' etc are meaningless outside of this context, of course.
I'm thinking the disconnect here is with being.
As an example, let me reference a king. What is a king? A son of king? That's one way. Appointed by a constitution? That's another. But is there an inherent 'kingship' outside of such definitions? Heredity is a property of the idea, not of kingship. So we can have a king but never a king which is a king. But regardless he can order my head cut off. In terms of a king as we define a king is the son of a king, then it is a truth claim to state that Arthur is a king. A social construct, a fantasy, is not precluded from instantiating something with 'power' in the world.
In a way, I think experience by definition is to 'play make believe'. Our experience by definition is always going to be at least one step removed. We do not perceive the world; we perceive constructs derived from sensory data.
Why I state insanity/sanity is meaningless in terms of being is that I don't see such as being applicable. As an example of what some might call insanity let us take: believing something is present which in fact is not there. Such is defined as irrational. It is contrary to the senses, as there is no sensory input to indicate such. However, if a hominid cognizes a lion in a bush, aka paranoia, and runs, there are generally two possibilities: 1) fruitless expenditure of energy decreases the individual chance of survival or 2) believing a predator near which cannot be perceived provides instances of escape where reliance on purely sensory data would have proved inadequate. Here what can be termed insanity has a chance of informing mental models of reality in ways that sensory data is too limited to do so. In this way, it can often enough better represent 'reality' in terms of survival.
Even our man with the coconut could derive a survival advantage from these activities, in the sense that social creatures generally require socialization or risk cognitive decline, therefore impairing their chances of survival.
(Survival is, of course, a short-term proposition which we extend implicitly into eternity, in one fashion or another, but evolution is a moment-to-moment phenomena.)
Anyway, I'm by no means trying to argue with you. I'm more musing than anything.
In other words, you can't even say my utterances are meaningless "outside" the system in which they were constructed because they cannot exist outside the system. A pawn in a game of checkers is not a pawn. A pawn in your pocket may resemble a pawn, but it does not function like a pawn because it is not in a game of chess...thus it is not a pawn because it cannot do as a pawn does.
I appreciate your philosophy, but from my standpoint, it is unnecessarily muddying the waters.
Some people believe they are living for things that are objectively false. Just imagine a grocery clerk who believes he will someday become the king of France--in 2022, which makes Descartes original comment about this seem even more absurd.
Every day he does his mundane job with unparalleled enthusiasm. He is awarded employee of the month every single month.
One day, an ambitious coworker asks him how he is able to do his boring job with such high energy--what's his secret?
"I am just biding my time until I become the king of France," the madman replies. "I'm not a grocery clerk...I'm a future king! Every bag I fill with groceries is but one step further towards my glorious coronation."
And so it is with all who think they are going somewhere spectacular with their lives. The bleak march to the grave is enchanted by dreams of an end that cannot be.
My "utterances" are not philosophical, but descriptions of what I observe to be happening around and within me. If you want to understand what I mean, you gotta play my game.
I like your comment about the coconut man. Yes, it's true that delusions can have a survival advantage. In fact, I would argue that delusions are not errors, but survival adaptations. Sometimes we just don't know what people are trying to keep alive. I know people who try to keep alive an idea of themselves in spite of their own physical body.
However, unless you want to live in misery, the delusions are all you have to enjoy the ride, what little time there is. But the thought always returns.
My original comment is just a rehash of hell, particularly suited for the modern narcissistic mind.
This sentence carries a lot of weight and I don't think it's terribly truthful, or at best, speculative.
Galileo wasn't in trouble with the church because "it would get people thinking". He was in trouble because he was directly opposing the power and teachings of the church. Whether people would "think" about it I don't feel is terribly relevant, let alone something you can definitively say. Do we really know that the church was worried people would "think for themselves", or just that.
This implication is that the church knew Galileo was right. It also implies that these "things you can't say" are universally good and beneficial to society. With falsehoods neatly hand-waved away by conflating them with "people in Pittsburgh are 10 feet tall". Well, people believe the earth is flat, vaccines cause 5G, that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, and a whole host of other things that are harmful to society in varying degrees.
Being shunned for your ideas isn't evidence that you are Galileo leading the world into a bright new future. More likely you are, at best, the eccentric who should be ignored and your idea is that people in Pittsburgh are 11 feet tall.
IIRC the most serious punishment he got was a home-arrest which he got after being rude to pope (which he was after he was forbidden to state his hypothesis as fact).
Also as a side note: Galileo didn’t form a hypothesis good enough as it predicted planets’ movements poorly. It was Kepler who formed much more accurate model and it got accepted by the Church.
There are also some other misbelieves about the Church like that they forbidden spreading the theory of evolution (while in fact they forbade priests to criticize it openly).
Is it fair to judge a historical figure for owning slaves in the 1600s? No. The ethical quandries of racism and the Abolitionist movement didn't start in earnest until the late 18th century.
Is it fair to judge American historical figures for owning slaves at a time when half of the country had already made it illegal? YES. You're now judging that person by the standards of their time. See also, Christopher Columbus.
Let's fast forward 200 years.
Is it fair to judge someone for being racist if they've grown up in the deep south, and are a product of the Jim Crow era, and were surrounded by propaganda about how the Civil War was not fought over slavery, and so forth? No.
Is it fair to judge the same person who goes to university, reads about the decades of systemic discrimination that endured even after ostensibly the Civil Rights Act passed, and whose reaction to "Black Lives Matter" is "No, All Lives Matter" based on an uncharitable superficial reading of the message? Yes.
The question isn't about whether you hold some opinions today that are considered "not woke". The question is whether you are holding the line for progress too low: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiSiHRNQlQo
What opinion was uttered and what consequence followed?
Is one to come to mind. Students and other teachers are deprived of a lecture because a small vocal minority of students are upset that in an unrelated interview, the professor expressed a fairly mainstream view of preferring "equality" over "equity".
A few questions for you personally:
1) When you use the term woke-ism, what are you referring to?
2) What would 'going too far' look like, to you in particular?'
3) In your worldview, is it possible for uttered opinions to have consequences that 'go too far'?
https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...
A Mexican driver was fired for stretching his fingers when driving. Somebody thought he was making a white supremacy sign and started the classical social media shitstorm.
For a blue collar immigrant worker, losing their job overnight might be pretty serious. They usually have fewer savings to rely on.
> NBC 7 spoke to the man who originally posted the picture on Twitter. He has since deleted his account and said he may have gotten "spun up" about the interaction and misinterpreted it. He says he never intended for Cafferty to lose his job.
A lost friendship is benign, I guess.
Oberlin Administrators & Bakery incident found the school owing 44 Million in Damages.
Honorable mentions
USC's Business School for being offended at the Chinese word "Na Ge"
Yale Law School for the Native American Law Students Association party invite
I suggest watching it if you have not seen it (10min long) but it basically boils down to that if you disagree with someone you can call it racists instead of formulating an argument. There is ofc no evidence that anyone on that show on that day is actually a racists but somehow people just accepted that it was valid to say anyway.
The consequences is that people said it more and more and other similar terms whenever it somehow fit. An opinion if it can be made to look like it affects a specific group of people is attacked as being against these people. It basically made a subset of he most pathetic and weak ad hominem fallacies acceptable and thus broke the way people had public discourse.
The U.S. State Department has classes for returning overseas staff to get them up to speed on changes in the US since they left.[2] This is said to be especially hard for teens.
[1] https://guides.ll.georgetown.edu/c.php?g=592919&p=4182201
Paul Graham has a sophomoric understanding of art and philosophy, at best.
As with people such as Elon Musk, he attempts to leverage success in one narrowly defined area into an authority over vast domains of human knowledge.
When I was fifteen, I thought his essays were profound. When I was fifteen, I thought many things were profound. It has been many decades since I was fifteen.
I feel no need for subsequent generations to recapitulate my mistakes. I may have learned something the hard way, but I have little interest in encouraging or participating in what amounts to a de facto practice of 'cogitational embryological parallelism'.
(Also how is what you're saying unsayable? People say this on practically every PG essay here. It's very obviously quite sayable)
Nothing here concerns 'that which can't be said'. If something truly can't be said, it's utterance is physically impossible, therefore being concerned about suppressing such or such being suppressed is a moot point. We are discussing things that can very much me stated, but which carry consequences of a certain nature.
Passion and dispassion are indicative of neither factualness, nor truthfulness, nor sensibility. This is a matter of form. A call for the death of a minority can be delivered with utter dispassion and pure reason and a plea for such a minority's salvation from such can be delivered with utter passion and vice versa.
'Making sense' depends on assuming my knowledge to be the horizon of that which is knowable. Something might not make sense, but it might not make sense because I lack some knowledge. (Is it a language I do not understand, or is it gibberish?) However, such might also make no sense because it never 'had sense to begin with' (a concept which could be considered dubious, but which I will go with for the moment). I, in this scenario, however, lack the knowledge to know that by definition. So does such not make sense because of a property inherent in its being, or does it not make sense because of my ignorance? While all that I can do is 'make sense' of things through my understanding, if I allow myself to conceptualize, or act on the assumption of such a conceptualization, that my knowledge is a totality of knowledge, I potentially commit an error which endangers me. (Though, conversely, there are those who would argue that anything less than absolute surety in oneself will lead to hesitation and destruction.) Secondly, this assumes that what 'makes sense' does so because of its inherent truthfulness. However, a sensible statement and a truth statement do not necessarily have to be synonymous. It would make sense, for example, why someone should not be allowed to insult God's representative on Earth. Sensibility always necessarily carries from certain assumptions which eventually cannot be evidenced.
I would even be tempted to say that the gamut of credibility is, besides possibly being wide bordering on infinity, probably shaped like a Klein bottle.
> old hipster
Well, that's not such a nice thing to say to someone as they're coming up on a birthday.
And to be overly generous to myself, you never actually asked for that information, just stated that I failed to provide such. Your actual questions, I did answer to a minimal degree.
As for anything else, I'll be productively lazy and possibly appropriate the results of the labor of someone else when it becomes available.
> Origin of gyp > An Americanism dating back to 1885–90; back formation from Gypsy.
Same with Miriram-Webster: [2]
> History and Etymology for gyp > > Noun > > probably short for gypsy
In either case, it is rude for the word to be used, contrary to what PG implies.
How does this relate to the article? I found 0 matches with Control+F.
http://www.paulgraham.com/saynotes.html
Note 9.
I try. We all fall short. Getting there is approaching a limit. But still, we must continue.
A recipe for this era would simply be to list banned posts on Twitter. Which we can't peruse because they are banned, proving the essay's point. You can't say what you can't say, but you can speculate on recipes for discovery.
It would be a valuable public service for someone to collect banned utterances and publish them to provide assistance to those of us who can't read the room any better than Sanskrit, so that we can avoid non-obvious heresies. But then they'd have to publish things that can't be said.
Person-A was in an online forum I was part of. Person-A said to Person-B, who was getting emotional in a discussion, to not act emotional, as it was a factual discussion.
Person-B accused Person-A of being insensitive to women, as it turns out Person-B was female.
Person-A did not know Person-B was female, as Person-A didn't use forum avatars, and the name Person-B used wasn't an obvious female name in Person-A's culture. In other words, Person-A could prove not knowing the gender of Person-B.
This was not sufficient, and Person-A was banned from the forum.
Ironically, Person-B was one of those loud "women and men are as competent as each other" sorts, which leads one to wonder why she needed special handling.
The icing on the cake: Person-C defended Person-A, knowing that the gender of Person-B was not known at the time of the comment. Person-C was banned from the forum.
The forum, by the way, was a professional forum of one of the largest tech companies. Everyone here would know the name of the company, and being banned from this forum essentially was a light way of getting onto a blacklist of several other tech companies. This actually eventually led to Person-C quitting technology entirely a year or two later.
And you can’t find out what you can’t say until you’re already being punished for having said it.
Of course you could just push it back a level and say that the fashions underpinning that commentary are invisible. But that feels a little bit like Sagan’s “ there’s a dragon in my garage” parable: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/The_Dragon_in_My_Garage
The reason for all their regulations are likely, that they live very crowded. The closer people live together - the more rules they come up after a while, to keep things somewhat stable.
Otherwise there are of course plenty of things you cannot say in holland, if you don't want people to be shocked.
In this piece there are a few items that jump out as glaring oversights and they speak to how brittle the entire structure of the argument is.
First, his conclusion is “if you think you shouldn’t say something, don’t.”
Pragmatic advice, but it essentially means that this piece is not an argument against self-censorship.
His solve of “have a few friends to share verboten thoughts with” is already how closed door social systems work. In-group signaling with taboo beliefs is a core feature of tribalism. Coupled with historic wealth/power inequality it is a de facto abdication of how the social bubble we create around ourselves enables us to imagine we are doing what is best for all when we have no idea (nor curiosity) about what other people’s actual experience is. That’s why we need DEI first principals.
I find it interesting that he references two domains in a hypothetical sense that are very, very different in experience.
First, parenting. He wasn’t a parent when he wrote this. Imagining we need to see children as innocent seems like a reasonable explanation. But in my experience the issue with cussing is that when you become a parent a protective instinct kicks in - you don’t want the social group to punish your child in your absence & you worry about collective ostracism if the group concludes you are a “bad parent.” It’s warranted. I’ve experienced it and it is brutal.
Second is fashion. Fashion is only invisible to those who don’t care about it. For those who do, it is an art form. There is a vast difference between “the fashion of the day” and the function/philosophy of fashion. In this respect he both misses and catches the point - fashion is architected by active participants and consumed by passive ones. “Moral fashion” captures the “issue of the day” of the IYKYK crowd that runs corporate/tech communities. It’s signaling, little more. He’s spot on in calling out that no issue that everyone talks about deserves to be regarded as “the issue” on its own merits. But he misses the point that fashion is amazing and an incredible expression of the human experience. I don’t get the sense he personally cares much about fashion.
The subtext to all of this is that there has been a powerful, violent set of social groups deciding who was allowed to be treated as a person and who was not.
Where we are today as a society has been deeply shaped by that.
Some of the people in those exiled groups are co-opting shame & blame. I think his point is that doing so only creates a new power structure that repeats old patterns, it doesn’t solve for something better.
So we are back to his first conclusion - which is you either actively or passively participate, but you don’t argue with it.
I think there’s another choice:
I will not shame anyone, for any reason.
Shame is the tool we keep reaching for & its cost is clear - we lose connection with our own humanity & each other’s.
That’s what I see as the new choice we can make for ourselves - letting go of the assumption that we can anticipate how our actions and words affect others, being open to learning, and taking responsibility for ourselves.
For me that has meant a studious avoidance of participating in media culture.
It is possible to contribute to making society a more inclusive and supportive experience w/out chasing the latest outrage fad. In fact, it might only be possible if we let go of “allyship” - which no one seems to want - and instead:
* make space for others to share their feelings * let go of blame (of ourselves or others) * support the voice of those with first-hand experience
A really cool new TV show that explores all of this is “Work in Progress.” Alongside “Schitt’s Creek” it’s really profound how friendly it can be to embrace a variety of identities in society without making ourselves or others wrong.